


Turns Into Earth

by ghuune



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Destiel - Freeform, Drabbles, End!verse, Endverse, Fluffy Ending, M/M, angst turns into fluff, future!verse, trigger warning for self harm, trigger warnings for rape mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 10:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5963662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghuune/pseuds/ghuune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabble!fic (each section exactly 100 words). Set in end!verse, Dean and Cas navigate their damage while rebuilding society. Poetic, iceberg-style angsty fluff. I swear unto God I have counted each section. I don't know where AO3 is getting that extra word from, but it's driving me mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turns Into Earth

I.  
It passed the time.

His grace was almost gone. Just enough remained to make him a little sturdier, a little faster, a little more dexterous, than a homegrown human. And what did he do with those last scraps?

He crafted tiny swans from the curls of paper left when they made dynamite.

Dean asked, “Why bother?”

“What else is left that's beautiful just because?”

Dean only stared at him.

Cas dangled swans in the light from the window so their shadows spread along the wall, vague as the memory of his wings.

“Besides,” he said, “I was stoned.”

II.  
The land changed back to the garden God first intended.

Deer in the undergrowth regarded him with solemn trust. Minnows glittered silver in the streams. The air itself smelled only of leaves and rain and silence, no more carbon emissions or unseen signals, no more distant laughter. 

Heavy smoke spilled from his mouth, a gray cloud in the clean sky. Earlier this year, fires raged unchecked in the major cities and across the plains, seared the sunsets rose and salmon, but now, everything that could burn, had burned.

He'd saved this world when he murdered every single person in it. 

III.  
When he broke his foot, he learned death was now an option.

Codeine turned to morphine turned to opium, easily cultivated from thick-headed poppies. Opium rendered him floppy on his cot, unable to rise for Dean, tight with violence. 

For a moment he wondered if Dean, denied, would resort to raping him. He's too stoned to resist, not that he would, even if he were sober.

Dean called him a useless fucking angel. 

He laughed. It's true. 

Perhaps he also meant to goad him. He'd never tell him this, but he wanted Dean to be the last thing he saw.

IV.  
The occasional flash of old Dean hurt most.

The troops, seated around the bonfire, passed bottles clockwise, joints counterclockwise. Dean, who'd decided to trust the sentries posted at the gate, slung his arm around Billy's shoulder, staggered when Rita pulled him down to tongue his ear. 

The paper beneath his tongue stung as it dissolved. Through its pane, the blaze became an angelic choir, singing praises for an absent God. 

Dean flopped beside him, breathless, laughing, his lashes spiking shadows on his cheeks. His smile mischievous, loose, warm. 

They're both so different now, Cas couldn't stand it. He looked away. 

V.  
Cas went on a painting kick, started murals on every wall at Camp Chitaqua.

It caught on, and soon all the troops slashed at each other with dripping brushes, red paint streaming, still in the war, even at play. Dean held himself aloof, glaring, his mouth distorted.

Cas tried to work him around. “C'mon, Fearless Leader.” 

Dried paint prickled him. He was naked, because why not. S'not like he had clothes to spare.

Dean stepped close, grabbed his arm, shook it. Pleading, harsh: “Cas, I can't use'm if they're wore out.”

Cas spoke against his mouth. “So? Use me instead.”

VI.  
Dean's teeth hooked over his collarbone, gasping as he drove into him, fingers leaving bruises on his hips.

What started as comfort was subject to the same decay as everything else, here, after the end; Dean came to him rough, came to him angry, came to him streaked with Croat blood. Even after Cas wrung out his very last orgasm, he screamed and sobbed in his sleep.

Sex failed to medicate his pain. One night, he offered Dean the bowl.

“Quit flinging yourself around the room and hit this.”

The look he shot him then was next to hate.

VII.  
Not always.

There's enough beauty to string Cas along. Maybe his grace wasn't burnout and death. Maybe there's enough left to save them. 

Mornings, when Dean blinked against light and grumbled about drapes, but Cas wouldn't close them until he'd loved the color of his eyes, green as sunshine through leaves.

His smiles, when he caught Cas staring. 

After firefights, when he cradled his jaw in his palms, ran his thumbs over his lips, gazed at him like the answer to a prayer. 

They sponged each other's wounds, water streaming pink with dilute blood.

It's enough; it keeps hope alive.

VIII.  
Cas started collecting glass.

Ruby, lavender, emerald, cobalt. He arranged them on his windowsills so they threw panels of color into his room.

Dean said, “Looks like a church in here.” 

Light stained Cas's skin blue. “Sixteen thirty,” he said, absorbed, fiddling. “That's when this will look its best.”

Dean grunted, threw himself on the cot. “Where'd you get this idea?”

“The sun caught in your eyes.”

His breath snagged like cloth on a nail. 

Sarcastic, not turning, Cas said, “Sorry. I know you hate the mushy stuff.” 

“That's not it, Cas,” he said then, with real pain. 

IX.  
Maintaining a gun:

Sit at a tarp-covered table across from silent Dean. Katydids provide the conversation.

Field strip the gun. Plunge the cleaning rod through the bore. Meet Dean's eyes and grin, slow, sly; raise an eyebrow. The scent of solvent sharp in the hot summer night.

Swab the barrel. The first swabs will be dirty. Smile as you set them aside, because your hand brushes Dean's. No matter what, you know he craves your touch. 

Lubricant. Your long fingers slip over the hard barrel, everything shining in the light from the single naked bulb. 

Dean surges over the table.

X.  
Danger graffiti all over this city, the sane warning the sane of the haunts of the mad, accidental art in the gestural lines of paint applied in haste.

“Cas, eyes front.”

Down the barrel of his gun, the world looked like a victim: his victim. Observing what he's wrought, Cas's faded grace nagged like a rotten tooth.

Every door looked like the one he'd opened to let Sam out. Every sign read “Detroit.”

Dean knew. It was in his eyes.

Sometimes he thought Dean would like to see him dead. He'd die happily if it meant Dean could rest.

XI.  
He almost got his wish, the Croat hanging over him, blood pouring from her throat like rain off a roof.

She wanted it in his mouth, his eyes. “Be one of us,” her recruiting slogan.

Tempting. Why not go mad? Drugs didn't work. Dean still barked agony at midnight. Wouldn't even execute him, which is all he deserved.

Still, he didn't want this madwoman to be the last thing he saw. He pinched his lips, screwed shut his eyes, held her off with his last strength until she gurgled and choked. 

No one was allowed to kill him but Dean.

XII.  
Juliette got knocked up with Camp Chitaqua's first baby, and everyone went a little crazy over it.

Seemed weird, what with all the wild fucking, that there weren't more pregnancies, but Cas thought the world was making up its mind. Now that evil reigned, perhaps the balance of life tipped towards extinction for humanity, leaving monkeys to inherit the Earth.

He refused to get his hopes up until the child was born. Still, he kept a lookout for cribs, baby bottles, things she'd need.

After every mission, Dean's rugged, badass troops looked embarrassed as they unloaded teddy bears and blankies.

XIII.  
“Wanted you to know I'm proud of you,” Dean said out of nowhere as they loaded up a Jeep.

Cas snorted. “Finally hitting triple digits? Sad to say, still only double.”

Dean flashed him a narrow look. The orgies were a no-fly zone, conversationally speaking. 

“You knocked that hard shit off. Pot, booze, I don't care, but I trust you more now.”

Cas bent over the hood, debated looking at him. Didn't. “I scared myself.” 

“Yeah? You scared me, too.” Dean slapped the side of the Jeep. “Cos if you'd asked me twice, I'd've followed you down.”

XIV.  
Oh, the joys of withdrawal, pacing, shaking. 

Bullshit. For an angel to come to this? Never had he felt more a failure.

Dean inventoried weapons, worked on rosters, keeping close. Cas wished he were concerned, but the truth was, Dean thought he'd break. 

He'd not exactly proven himself strong.

A glass shard in his hand. This didn't count. He just gamed his human body. It medicated its pain, endorphins tumbling lush from outraged neurons.

Then came Dean's wordless roar.

He cut himself, ripping the glass away, hands clumsy, palms sweating. 

His bloody fingers on Cas's white linen shirt printed pink.

XV.  
“He hasn't made a move,” Cas said. “Maybe he won't.”

Dean scowled and rolled his eyes, but Cas pressed his point.

“Think, Dean. If he wanted us dead, we'd be dead.”

“What, you think he likes us?” His fingers dented the wood of the table. This hot, wet summer rendered everything spongy. A whisper: “You think it's Sammy?”

Cas swallowed. “I think Lucifer respects the necessity of both good and evil in God's creation.”

“So, not Sammy.” Dean shoved off the table, went to the window, shoulders braced against pain.

His nightmares were intense that night.

XVI.  
Dean found him relaxing on the riverbank after a swim.

“Cas? Time for church.”

Cas squinted at the sun. “Gimme another half hour.”

Dean didn't want to hear that. His tongue on Cas's neck hit him as hard as the drugs he no longer took, woke a craving as powerful as the one he'd left behind.

He argued his case with his body until Cas was gasping, loose and aching, close to begging. 

“Get me dirty.”

Dean smiled. “Baptism it is.”

His muddy hands left slick black prints on his naked skin, primal paintings on a cave wall.

XVII.  
They didn't talk about it.

Albedo off the snow turned the predawn peach and cream. They trudged through yet another tomb city, bitter cold stunning the scent of decay, kicking through mummified corpses piled in frigid rooms, the dried husks of long-dead insects.

Winter silence enclosed everything. 

Sam, Lucifer, frosted breath trapped on windowpanes. Icicles stabbed from eaves like angel blades. The fear of him, risen but, for some reason, calm. This inaction was worse than open war.

“What next?” They'd looted the hospital for antibiotics, but Dean really meant: What now?

“We live our lives,” Cas said. 

XVIII.  
It took millenia for the sea to change from soup to water, for life to cohere and come to shore. Healing must be like that.

In Camp Chitaqua, families of choice were born, people living together because they wanted to. Juliette's son was healthy; she'd survived the childbirth and the fever which followed. More pregnant women showed their bellies. 

The barter economy solidified into a system. The first openly monogamous couple scandalized people grown accustomed to free love. It was Dean and Cas, who slept together, safe inside pink light. 

They let the Devil live, and he left them alone.


End file.
